BUSINESS FILINGS

LLRX.com,
which hawks "law and technology resources for legal professionals,"
has a state-by-state summary of online databases of business
filings, most of which are available free.

COURTS - FEDERAL

The federal court system
doesn't get the coverage it deserves from rural news outlets,
partly because it only has a few courthouses in each state.
But federal courts have a wonderful online system for tracking
cases, called Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or
PACER. It includes not only district courts, which handle trials,
but the appellate courts and bankruptcy courts. Sign up for
it at https://pacer.login.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.

DEATH/CRIME STATS

Death Indexes,
http://www.deathindexes.com/
"A directory of online death indexes listed by state and
county. Included are death records, death certificate indexes,
death notices & registers, obituaries, probate indexes,
and cemetery & burial records."

National Sex Offender
Public Registry, http://www.nsopr.gov/
Here you can search names submitted by 22 states. Information
returned includes the sex offender's crimes, date of birth,
address, physical description, date registered and when the
information was last updated.

GEOGRAPHY/POPULATION

Time and Date,
http://www.timeanddate.com/
This site can give time zones for cities around the world along
with sunrise and sunset times, convert one time zone to another,
calculate the number of days between any two dates, provide
dialing codes, and generate a calendar for any year, past and
present.

National Association of Counties, http://www.naco.org/
Go here to find the county a city is located in, or the cities
within a county. The site also offers other information about
all U.S. counties, including population, square miles, the year
of founding, elected officials and phone numbers.

Safe Road Maps, http://www.saferoadmaps.org/home/
This website uses FARS data,
the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) makes vehicle crash information accessible and useful so that traffic safety can be improved. Fatality information derived from FARS includes motor vehicle traffic crashes that result in the death of an occupant of a vehicle or a non-motorist within 30 days of the crash. FARS contains data on all fatal traffic crashes within the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

PEOPLE SEARCHES

Local white and
yellow page searches, http://www.areaconnect.com/
This site offers free access to each state's available white
and yellow pages.

Geobytes, http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm
This site offers a free Internet Protocol Address geographical
locator, so
that you can locate someone who sent you an e-mail. Just get
the IP address
from the mail, it will be in the "source" information
for the message,
usually in the e-mail header, and will have sets of numbers
separated by
periods. It may look something like this: 123.456.78.90. Then
enter this
in the locator tool to find out where the person lives.

RESEARCH MATERIALS

SearchSystems,
http://www.searchsystems.net/From Al Tompkins' Morning
Meeting: "SearchSystems.net is a collection of more
than 35,000 public record databases. You can tap into them for
free, or pay about five bucks a month for fast access to the
data. It is one of just a few Web sites I pay for. With it,
you're able to search all sorts of licenses, inspection records,
corporation records and a ton more in every state -- plus territories
-- and even some other countries. When I show foreign journalists
this site, their jaws drop. And, sadly, most American journalists
have access to these kinds of open records and still do not
use them to enrich stories and dig deeper."

Public Libraries
Briefcase, Using
Public Records
This site explains how to use public records to conduct business
research.

The Fallacy Files, http://www.fallacyfiles.org/
This site investigates different illogical arguments, and the
books that were published to support the original claims.

Weblens search portal, http://www.weblens.org/
"WebLens features dozens of embedded searches and links
to thousands of the Net's most popular search engines, directories,
metasearch tools, music and image searchers, people finders,
company locators, reference tools, job databases, recipe archives,
scholarly research resources and more."

Critical thinking portal, Limbicnutrition
Limbicnutrition has lots of information for critical thinking,
including a list of popular fallacies, classic propaganda and
persuasion techniques, and methods for argumentation.

Story Database, http://www.ire.org/resource-center/stories/
You can use this database to search thousands of investigative
stories, either to get ideas or find out what other reporters
have discovered in their research.

GoshMe, http://www.goshme.com
This site calls itself a "Web
Search Assistant." You post a keyword, click at least one
category, and get a list of search engines with a description
of how many results each one got for your keyword, ranked by
relevance and divided by category.

Congressional Budget Office, http://www.cbo.gov/
Here you can find current budget projections and budget options,
along with other items of interest such as the economic impact
of Hurricane Katrina, recent social security analyses, and historical
budget data.

National Conference of State Legislatures,
http://www.ncsl.org/
NCSL is an organization for state legislatures. The group "provides
research, technical assistance and opportunities" for policymakers
to exchange ideas on pressing state issues.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, http://www.cbpp.org/
The Center offers reports and analysis of issues facing the
federal budget.

U.S. Department of Energy, http://energy.gov/
The USDE website has information on current energy policy and
the energy budget.

State employee retirement systems, http://www.census.gov/govs/www/retire.html
The Employee-Retirement System survey provides "revenues,
expenditures, financial assets, and membership information"
for individual, national, state and local retirement systems.
National Council on Public Polls, http://www.ncpp.org/
This site has a list of questions journalists should ask before
analyzing public poll data.

Public Health Reports, http://www.publichealthreports.org/
This site has information on research and projects related to
public health. "Public health carries out its mission through
organized, interdisciplinary efforts that address the physical,
mental and environmental health concerns of communities and
populations at risk for disease and injury. "
Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org/
This site has information from all the past presidential elections,
including the dates of the election and each state's electoral
votes.

The
Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues
helps non-metropolitan media define the public agenda in their
communities, through strong reporting and commentary on local
issues and on broader issues that have local impact. Its initial
focus area is Central Appalachia, but as an arm of the University
of Kentucky it has a statewide mission, and it has national
scope. It has academic collaborators at Appalachian State University,
East Tennessee State University, Eastern Kentucky University,
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marshall University, Middle
Tennessee State University, Ohio University, Southeast Missouri
State University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill,
the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Washington and Lee University,
West Virginia University and the Knight Community Journalism
Fellows Program at the University of Alabama. It is funded by
the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the University
of Kentucky, with additional financial support from the Ford
Foundation. To get notices of Rural Blog postings and
other Institute news, click here.